Online competitor benchmarking tools

Our pick of the best tools to review and improve all aspects of your online marketing

When I train or give talks to marketers on digital marketing, I see that tools are popular. Often people will reach for their pens when I mention a tool to help inform their marketing. New, free tools are naturally the most popular!

Since we launched Smart Insights we have reviewed many tools in posts which we highlight in the “Tools and Software” sections in many of our free Quick Guides.

I thought it would be useful to bring these together in one place so you can check out tools you could use for benchmarking many different aspects of online marketing. Since many of the tools we’ve covered help us compare one site or aspect of online marketing against competitors, I’ve collated these here and Dan and I have a new guide explaining how to run a benchmarking project:

Recommended Guide: Our guide to benchmarking gives you a structured approach to review all aspects of your digital marketing against your competitors across our RACE framework, but focusing on benchmarking of websites.Download our Online competitor benchmarking guide.

This is how I see the many different types of benchmarking tools we can use within our RACE framework. I’ve summarised all our posts reviewing different types of tools in the excellent Free/multiplatform  mind-mapping service. Links to the posts are at the end of this post.

Categories of tools for online competitor benchmarking

Here are our posts, categorised by RACE which review and link to different types of benchmarking tools and services.

Competitor benchmarking tools

New additions since last update:

• Social Crawlytics (review volume of shares on different networks)
• Bing Webmaster Tools for SEO backlink analysis

• Plan
  • Audience share and composition
    • ~ Google Agency Toolkit
      
    • ~ Competitor site sizes
      
  • + -
    Investment in digital media
    • ~ Online ad spend benchmarks
      
    • ~ Referral mix
      
  • Platform usage
    • ~ Mobile marketing statistics
      
• Reach
  • Search marketing
    • Keyword Analysis
      • ~ Keyword analysis tools
        
    • SEO
      • ~ 5 Link analysis tools
        
    • PPC/AdWords
  • + -
    Social media marketing
    • ~ Influencer analysis tools
      
    • ~ Social sharing tools & analysis
      
  • Display advertising
    • ~ Clickthrough rates
      
• Act
  • Website engagement
    • ~ Bounce rate compilation
      
    • ~ Heatmapping tools
      
  • Site experience feedback
    • ~ Customer feedback  tools
      
• Convert
  • Conversion rates
    • ~ Ecommerce conversion rates
      
    • ~ Competitor price analysis
      
• Engage
  • Email marketing
    • ~ Open and click rates
      
    • ~ Timing (day of week)
      
    • ~ Timing (time of day)
      
    • ~ Best frequency for Email
      
  • Customer experience feedback
    • ~ Customer feedback  tools
      
    • ~ 1. Voice of Customer Website Feedback Tools and Software
      
    • ~ 2. Crowdsourcing feedback tools and Software
      
    • ~ 3. Simple page or concept feedback tools
      
    • ~ 4. Site Exit Survey Tools
      
    • ~ 5. General Online Survey Tools
      
  • Social media marketing
    • ~ Facebook analysis tools
      
    • ~ Google+ analysis tools
      
    • ~ LinkedIn analysis tools
      
    • ~ Pinterest analysis tools
      
    • ~ Twitter analysis tools
      
      • ~ Hashtag analytics
        
    • ~ YouTube analysis tools
      I hope you find this compilation of benchmarking tools helpful – as you review the tools, do let us know of any your recommend in the comments. TIA!